Bold Estimate of Web's Thirst
For Electricity Seems All Wet

Not everything is debatable. Some statements are facts or they're not. Like the answer to this question: How much electricity does the Internet use?

At the height of the dot-com boom in May 1999, a policy wonk named Mark P. Mills estimated "that the electricity appetite of the equipment on the Internet has grown from essentially nothing 10 years ago to 8% of total U.S. electricity consumption today," or about 295 billion kilowatt hours a year. Add in all other uses of computers, he said, "and the share of...